Deborah Colker’s trademark fusion of high energy and irreverant modern dance is perfectly employed to explore the goings-on inside a constantly morphing multi-level house, where walls become floors and floors become ceilings.

This Dance Umbrella debut and European premiere of Casa from the Olivier award-winning choreographer, last seen in a sell-out London run as part of BITE:00, transforms everyday routines and gestures into vibrant contemporary dance while recognisably classical steps are revved up and subverted by colloquial gesture.

The unique set is constantly used to challenge ideas of space and gravity, of what can and can’t be done as acrobatics, gymnastics and diverse dance styles combine in this exhilarating dance spectacular.

Gertrude Stein, interviewed on American radio in the 1930s, was asked about the need for a work of art to be understood. “If you enjoy it you understand it” was her simple and priceless response. I wonder what Stein would have made of Deborah Colker. This exuberant Brazilian choreographer is a major player in the cultural landscape of her native country. There her dances have wracked up audience figures of 200,000, drawn from all ages and all walks of life. How many other choreographers can you think of who can boast of a nine-week run, as Colker’s work has enjoyed in her home town of Rio de Janeiro?

Colker’s popularity has global dimensions. Her eponymous troupe has wowed London audiences with Rota and the Olivier-winning Mix. The first culminated with the dancers spinning like happy, handsome hamsters on a giant wheel. The second, a heady grab-bag of stylistic and thematic juxtapositions, climaxed with a stunning climbing-wall set-piece.

Casa, which is showing in Umbrella as part of the Barbican’s BITE:02 season, spotlights body architecture, the acrobatics of relationships and the accommodations people sharing a space must make in order to fit into each other’s lives. The cunning jungle-gym of a domestic set was inspired by Colker’s own multi-level dwelling, while the movement material is derived from universally familiar activities like cooking and eating, sleeping, fighting, dressing and undressing, and having sex.

If the dance world ran contests for Most Vivid Personality, Colker would have scant competition for top prize. A small, blazingly confident blonde of Russian-Jewish extraction, she is the only choreographer I have ever heard hailed with bravos after a post-show Q&A session. With a smile as ravenous as her appetite for culture, she’s a human tidal wave of enthusiasm and curiosity about life and dance and the myriad intersections possible between the two. “I am like an old woman,” she declares, “but also a little girl. I want to play with serious matters.”

The serious matters include physics, domesticity, fashion, aesthetics, sports, space, energy, breath and emotions, and that’s just for starters. But the point of Colker’s dances, and the key to their appeal, is less heavy-duty concepts than high accessibility. They’re loaded with visual imagination and kinetic daring, yet at the same time thoroughly grounded in a recognisable reality.

“If you are not a person with a vision of the world in your head,” she says, “you can’t be a choreographer. My work is like Brazil - the mix of colors, the dynamics and rhythms, the happiness and possibility of a long way of discovery. It’s a little history we have. Five hundred years. People think there are still monkeys in the streets, alligators and Indians. Okay, it’s a Third World country. But it’s an honor to me that my influence is this beautiful, creative, strange place, with its music, and the misery living alongside the rich. “I’m very ambitious,” Colker continues, “but not for money. I want my work to be seen.” Viewing her dances as “motion in search of entertainment” and “sensation with intelligence,” she remains a model of how intertwined person is with place. “Brazil is like me: never tired. At the same time, people here know how to sit and see the ocean and feel the wind. It’s a very intelligent moment to understand such a simple thing. It’s a genius, like Fred Astaire dancing. Yes, it’s the same. I can’t say more.” Don’t bet on it.

_________________This interview was posted by Stuart Sweeney on behalf of Donald Hutera and first appeared in Dance Umbrella News.

Donald Hutera writes regularly on dance and arts for The Times, Evening Standard, Time Out, Dance Europe, Dance Magazine (US) and Dance Now. He is co-author, with Allen Robertson, of The Dance Handbook.

BRAZILIAN choreographer Deborah Colker has an unquenchable desire to play games with bodies and space. To an extent the stars of her shows are their sets. In Rota her dancers spun in triumph on a giant ferris wheel, with themselves as the carriages. In the Olivier-winning Mix they climbed with lizardly dexterity across a vast, studded wall.

Deborah Colker has already done so much in her life, you wonder how she ever found time to sleep. She is so wired up, Brazilian voice bursting with enthusiasm, face alive with nervous energy, you wonder if she can sleep. At 41 years old, she has enough achievements on her CV for several people: classical pianist (emulating her late father, a violinist and conductor); former champion volleyball player (training four hours a day); psychology graduate (five years at university); dancer (ballet and contemporary); mother (two children) and pet-owner (five dogs). She does nothing by halves, not even interviews, engaging mind and body with reckless, calorie-burning commitment. After two hours with her, I'm so exhausted I need a lie-down.

There is a striking resemblance between the 16 inhabitants of the designer house in Deborah Colker's Casa and the inmates of a more famous TV dwelling. They cook, eat, dress, quarrel and sleep in full public view; they have pretty bad taste in music. But comparisons with Big Brother end there. That programme goaded its participants into nastiness; Colker is simply out to fill her house with happy, sexy entertainment.

‘To construct a house is to construct spaces’ ‘To dance is to occupy spaces, the architecture of movement’ Deborah Colker

In the high energy, athletic Casa (1999) the performers pulsate through, into, out of and around the huge skeleton of a house designed by Colker’s long-time collaborator Gringo Cardia. As the piece unfolds, so does the beautifully designed house structure. Performers leap from walls and floors, limbs protrude through windows, ceilings become climbing frames and doors open to reveal hidden spaces or ‘rooms’.

The proficiency of the dancers in a range of techniques is phenomenal, and has to be, to cope with the acrobatic, consistently fast-paced choreography. It’s also a rare treat to see so many dancers performing, offering the opportunity to witness some large, energeitc group sections.

Casa is potentially a brilliant advertising tool for dance, particularly for a young, trendy crowd, as it combines dynamic, contemporary movement, high quality performers, fashion and design in an accessible, exciting performance.

Unfortunately, during a couple of sections in the latter half of the work, the driving acrobatic movement starts to get tedious, as the audience are denied a break from the, fast paced dynamics. Colker seems to reject chorographically more sensitive, detailed moments, and variation in speed, in favour of sticking to crowd pleasing up-beat movement. As a result, some sections towards the end seem unnecessary and the work starts to loose its attraction though overuse of the very thing that makes it so attention grabbing initially. However, the piece does become interesting once more in the end section as the performers gradually retreat and the house structure predictably, but effectively, implodes to its original form.

Cardia and Colker successfully construct, occupy and reconstruct the spaces in their house of play, but, whilst the movement is initially exciting, it looses its attraction due to a lack of dynamic variation and intricate exploration into the architecture of movement. However, at least Casa reminds us that contemporary dance can be upbeat and fun.

Having spent two weeks in the snow in Russia reading Anna Karenina, I was feeling introspective and introverted. By the time I walked out of the Barbican on Saturday night, I was firing on all cylinders and felt like partying all night. That is how Deborah Colker and her company hook you: sixty minutes of fast-moving choreography that thrills and exhilarates, and all performed by beautiful dancers. Typically Brazilian!

The dancing is performed off walls, through doorways, on raised platforms and under showers. The installation off, on, through, under and over which the dancers dance, is a house: “Casa”. Without doubt Colker uses the installation to good effect. None of the choreographed duets looks false insofar as the use of the “casa” is entirely integral to the performance. Girls are launched off walls, boys fall down platforms and we know that the choreography came after the installation was conceived and not before. People go about their ordinary business at home. Except that cleaning one’s teeth, getting ready for bed and taking a shower are all jazzed up somewhat.

The dancers are sublime – their precision, their accuracy and their attention to detail are second to none. How difficult is it to exchange clothes with someone in time to the music? Answer: very difficult – try it. Sleeves get hooked on to hands, hats miss heads and trousers stick to legs. In this performance it looked like there must have been a thousand takes strung together. But in live performance there are no takes. So obviously they were simply brilliant performers.

The music was unmemorable but a good foil for the dancing. Colker kept up with her dancers admirably and lent a certain maturity to the performance. My one criticism would be that I didn’t see what the dancers could do. I saw that they could perform any challenge thrown at them to the highest standard whether it be lyricism, athleticism, gymnastics or timing. What I couldn’t see was the individual artistry of each dancer. They formed an homogenous bunch of good dancers from which I could not pick out individual strengths or personalities. I wanted to see the personality brought out of each of these dancers but it didn’t happen. It was an exceptional evening nonetheless.

After the giant wheel of Rota, after the climbing wall of Mix, here comes the Brazilian dance-maker Deborah Colker's next "equipment" piece: Casa, whose five-ton, three-storey wooden house fills the stage. The walls half-open, so you can watch Colker and her dancers slide down poles like firemen, and hang from ceilings, and generally do things you or I would consider only if we were completely mad. Or rather, they do things that we all do – but couched in a way that takes hours of daily physical training. We see them preparing food, taking a shower, getting dressed, having arguments, because Colker is interested in the banal events of domestic life.

Well, that's the theory. In complete honesty, for all Colker's enthusiastic efforts as director, choreographer and performer, Casa is curiously antiseptic.

Two extremes of contemporary dance went head-to-head this week under the aegis of Dance Umbrella. At the Barbican: six tons of set-design and a buzzing Brazilian house-party; at Sadler's Wells, worship at the shrine of American minimalism. Both were received with loud enthusiasm. Both left me wondering: what did these people see that I didn't? Deborah Colker, from Brazil, is now a regular visitor to the Barbican with her determined belief that dance doesn't have to happen on the horizontal. Past productions have featured a vast climbing wall and a ferris wheel. This time she's gone for broke with a life-size, cut-away house. At least, she calls it a house, but it's more of a chic, three-storey gym of blond wood, complete with knee-holds set into the ceilings, fireman's poles instead of stairs, a power shower and a silently motorised drawbridge. Why the drawbridge? I think just so that designer Gringo Cardia can show how clever he is.

Beware choreographers bearing sets. Large sets are the Trojan horses of dance. They heave themselves on stage with a great to-do in the programme notes about philosophical conceptualism and motor sensation (dance would be even more fertile territory for Ricky Gervais than the office), but far too often they bring forth gnat-sized dance.

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